Pleins feux sur l'assassin (1961)
Directed by Georges Franju

Film Review

Georges Franju's immediate follow-up to his chilling festival of frights, Les Yeux sans visage (1960), is an equally atmospheric dreamlike romp, the director's second collaboration with the infamous writing team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac.  The authors who provided the inspiration for two of cinema's most devious thrillers - Les Diaboliques (1955) and Vertigo (1958) - concoct another nerve-racking murder mystery, which Franju attacks with his usual penchant for expressionistic mood setting.  The creepy medieval château which is the venue for this mischievous whodunit becomes the main player in the drama, something which is frighteningly apparent in a haunting son et lumière sequence that is worthy of F.W. Murnau or Fritz Lang.

Rising star Jean-Louis Trintignant heads a fairly nondescript cast, the lead's charismatic presence cruelly exposing the lack of character depth which is the film's principal shortcoming.  Apart from the seductive JLT and the ever-brilliant Pierre Brasseur (glimpsed all too briefly in the prologue), the rest of the actors merge into a pretty uninteresting ensemble and leave us unmoved as, one by one, they are picked off by a mysterious assassin (yes, it looks like yet another rehash of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians...).  Franju was a filmmaker who was more interested in visual expression than the tedious mechanics of storytelling and characterisation, and nowhere is this more evident than in Pleins feux sur l'assassin, his most artistically self-conscious film.

On its initial release, this leaden and distinctly unsuspenseful thriller was ill-received by the critics and bombed at the French box office, a setback from which Franju would never fully recover.  Along with the director's subsequent genre films, Judex (1963) and Nuits rouges (1974), Pleins feux sur l'assassin is a film that has a pleasing eccentricity about it, subtly subverting its conventions to offer something unsettlingly dark and weird.

Film Synopsis

Realising that he is about to die, the Count of Keraudren hides himself behind a one-way mirror in a secret room at his chateau.  From here, he can observe the consequences of his sudden disappearance.  At the reading of the will, Keraudren's relatives are dismayed when they learn they will have to wait five years before they can receive their share of the inheritance.   The hopeful beneficiaries are: Jean-Marie, a student, and his girlfriend, Micheline; Jeanne, who is unhappily married to Claude and thinks only of her cousin André;  Edwige, a German horsewoman; Guillaume, a fine arts attaché;  the alcoholic Christian; and Henri.  To raise some badly needed money, this disparate group of people decide to stage a son et lumière show at the chateau, the theme being a love drama set in the middle ages.  Whilst repairing a spotlight, Henri is killed by an electric shock.  Was this an accident or murder...?